When I started this blog back in 2006, my main goal was to earn money using the google adsense program. However when you begin with a new website or blog, you aren't going to start making money right away. Many people are deterred by this lack of instant gratification and give up. After all when you see that your daily earnings are only 12 cents, there is not a lot of reason to keep going. What you have to understand is how a blog works, and how to get your earnings up. There's no get rich quick scheme with blogging. But for those who are committed to spend a few hours a week to update their blog, the long run results are worth it. I have written this guide to help people understand how to increase their adsense earnings on their blog.
What is Google Adsense?
Google has two programs that revolve around their PPC (Ppc) ads. The Google adwords program where you can buy advertising based on keywords and demographics ( For Advertisers ). The Google Adsense program where you can display Google Ads on your website or blog, and make money ( For Publishers ). When you join Google Adsense you'll get HTML codes that you paste onto your website or blog. This may cause google ads to display relative advertising to your website's visitors. You are paid based on Impressions and Clicks. If someone clicks on one of your google ads, google will pay you a commission based on how much the advertiser was willing to pay for the ad.
How much will I make using Google Ads?
This depends on your site's content, and how much traffic you get. Remember Google's ads are contextual, meaning they are going to attempt to feed ads that are relative to the content on your webpage. If you blog about real estate then you might get google ads from other agents, or brokers. If you blog about legal services, then you might get google ads for local lawyers. If you blog about the latest women's fashion trends, then you're likely to get ads from online clothing retailers. You will get paid 10? for a click on fashion trends, and then $5 for a click on real estate. Then you also get paid based on impressions. Impression traffic pays very low, typically its only maybe $1 per 1000 impressions. The click through rates on google ads will vary. In my experience I get about a 0.5% click through rate. That means 1 from every 200 impressions results in a click. There isn't a limit to how much you can make with Google Adsense. Its just dependent on driving lots of quality traffic to your blog.
How much do you make with Adsense?
Honestly not very much. I am running Google Adsense on about 6 websites. My two big earners are this blog and directory site I setup ( they make up 90% of my earnings ). I average $9-$10 per day. Remember I am not a frequent blogger. I might blog about once a week. My monthly checks from google range from $260 - $290, and has been pretty consistent for the last year. Last year Google paid me about $3200. Not bad, but I definitely will not be buying an island anytime soon.
Blogging for the right reason
Granted everybody wants to make money, but before you run out and try to build some site based on some rare cancer you know nothing about just because you heard the PPC rate is $50 / click, Make sure you rethink this approach. Blog about something you like, and something you are knowledgable about. Avoid time sensitive topics, that will only be relevant for the next week or month. The best blog articles will provide solutions to problems, or give analysis on products and services. Lets say your a programmer like me. You keep getting an error in your code that is very hard to debug. Eventually you find a solution. It is deemed an excellent opportunity to blog. The probability is other people are going to run into this same trouble in the future. Blog about it.
Constructing quality Blog Articles
Quality unique content is king with search search engines like yahoo. If you construct your article properly it will rank well on major search engines. You won't get top rank over night, but with time it will move opening into the list. A blog entry should have many text that describes something in as much detail as possible. Include photos in your article that has the ALT image tags specific to your article and the picture. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags on break up your article into sections. Hyperlink keywords within your blog to other sections of your website that are relevant. Provide external links to relevant sources. Most importantly take some time, and don't rush through it. Make it an enjoyable read.
Revenue of Blogging
Any time you are going to build a website with the intention of running Google Ads, you want to make sure your are likely to get a reasonable return. If you are not a programmer with the skills to build your own blog, then you are likely going to should pay someone to set it up for you. There are costs to running a blog. Domain ( $12 / year ), Hosting ( $10 / month for shared ). Plus your time to write new articles, and moderate any comments. We intend to assume that the time you spend blogging was not being used for any other financially productive activity. So this time had no real value to you. So after the first year your blog cost you to $132. However since these are costs of doing buisiness ( IE running a blog that makes money ), you can deduct these expenses on your taxes. Same with your home Internet connection which could provide you another $50 monthly deduction. However don't get too excited about deductions. Its not like you can write off a daily starbucks addiction because you tend to write your blog articles from a coffee cafe down the street.
Anytime you'll invest money you want a return on investment. A blog is very similar to stock dividends. You invest money into it, and then they pay you a dividend every quarter. Lets say a stock pays a 4% annual dividend. You invest $100K into this stock, and at the end of the year this stock has paid you $4000. Now lets compare this to my adsense revenue. Last year I made about $3200 from Google Adsense. This is equal to investing $100K into a stock that pays a 3.2% annual dividend.
Think about that for a second. My Blog is paying me the same, as $100K worth of stock that pays a 3.2% annual dividend. So even if it costs a person $10K to build a really nice custom blog, once they get the traffic built up the returns are excellent. A good Blog will pay you dividends the rest of your life. Granted its taken 6 years to grow my blog to this point, but it has been done much faster. Remember I only blog maybe once a week. If I put an hour every day into blogging something unique, I could have reached this level much faster. Also if I knew what I know now, I wouldn't have wasted so much time blogging about stuff that doesn't help people solve problems, or provide analysis on products or services.
Driving Traffic to your blog
Pick the right topics to blog about. Don't go on some rant about the latest celebrity gossip. Too many sites already focus on this stuff, and the SEO value of this content is too short lived. Focus on articles that solve problems, or give reviews on products or services that people are still going to Google for years to come. The right Articles will continue to drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your website every week. Integrate Social networking buttons into your blog helping to get word of mouth to drive traffic. If your article is good enough submit it to other sites that list blog articles and could provide a link to your blog.
Blogging Sins
Paid Traffic
Never use paid traffic, or link farms to try to get more visitors. These systems are full of fraud. On one site a client paid $20 for 25K visitors. Naturally you would think that the clicks would more than pay for the traffic. Perhaps the biggest issue is this traffic never really lands on your site. Its usually driven with popups, that enter and exit so fast that the people never even see your website. My client who tried this didn't get a single click from the 25K visitors. The stats server and Google Adsense Reports validated my theory. 99% of these visitors weren't on the site long enough to load the google Ads.
To your average person who knows nothing about websites, they will be blinded by a spike in the traffic logs. Paid traffic doesn't work! Avoid them.
Clicking your own ads
Never click your own ads. Google knows more about you than you think. If they for a second think you are clicking your own ads, they will suspend your Google Adsense Account. Even though there are many other Ad sites that offer services similar to google, they don't pay anything close to what google does. If you can't run google Ads, and you can't get direct advertisers, then don't even bother running a website.
Tell your friends to click your ads
Don't do this either. One of the biggest mistakes people make is the second they get their adsense account setup. They tell their friends to click all their ads. Google will detect your CTR (Click Through Rate ) is way above the 0.5% and will suspend your account.
Conclusions about blogging
If you wish to make money using Google Adsense be prepared to invest a lot of time, and be patient for the results. If you are saying to yourself you do not have the time to blog, ask yourself this. How many hours a day are you wasting on Facebook, Watching TV, or Gaming? How much time do you waste getting caught up in your friends and family's drama? Are any of these activities getting you ahead?